FamiLAB is a hackspace in Orlando, Florida that Eben and I had a really great time visiting back in October. It’s hidden away in an industrial unit – it’s a big space, with its own commercial-sized CNC milling machine, 3d printers, laser cutters, an in-progress replica of the Bridge from Star Trek: TNG, some traffic lights, a cherry picker and a whole bunch of computers – broadly speaking, it’s pretty close to heaven. And it’s full of some great people, who use the space to get together, eat pizza, learn things (just this week their timetable include tutorials with the Pi, with Arduino, a microcontrollers show-and-tell session, a learn-to-solder session and an intro to Scratch), and make really, really cool stuff.

Ted from Familab has made a Raspberry Pi SNES hack with a difference. We see quite a few really nice little projects where an old console is gutted, a Pi stuffed inside, and the games run on the Pi. This is a bit different. It’s not just a casemod; it’s a Super Nintendo emulated on the original hardware; and it even reads (and stores the information from) old cartridges; it can write saves to them too!

This project is one of the most intense RP projects I have seen. Ted has gone to the nth degree with features on this! He has integrated the pi in such a way that the original feel of the hardware’s behavior and functionality are true. He installed an Arduino to manage the power down procedure between the SNES console and the RP. Check out his documentation as Liz pointed out:http://familab.org/blog/2012/12/snes-super-nintendo-emulated-system/

toxibunny, Retroarch fills the entire screen, but is slower than the SNES9x 1.39 I had running in that video. SNES9x 1.39 is hard coded to run at 320×240, and if I fix the video modes for the Pi, I could get SNES9x to run in full screen, as well.

Due to time and energy constraints (The blog was over 7 pages) I haven’t properly compared the emulators with benchmarks and screenshots as I should. I’ll probably get around to it, though.

Blimey! If he were to sell such a thing, I know many enthiusasts would buy it! While the SNES isn’t a platform I’d be chasing, such work applied to the Commodore 64 is something on which I’d spend good money.